One Pure Thing
by Panache
Summary: “You always come here. I’ve seen you.” How a moment of reconnection can change the world. [MollyMohinder set during Five Years Gone]


**Title –** One Pure Thing

**Author -- **Panache  
**Rating -** PG-13;  
**Pairing -** Mohinder/Molly  
**Spoilers/Warnings -** Up through 1.23 "How to Stop an Exploding Man," slight underage themes, set in the "Five Years Gone" AUverse  
**Summary -** _He waits for her in the shadows, staring out at the seemingly perpetually overcast sky. She won't come. She never comes. But he waits all the same . . ._

**Notes – **First Heroes fic. The whole idea of Molly and Mohinder in the future wouldn't leave me alone  
**Disclaimer –** Someone else's sandbox.

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He waits for her in the shadows, staring out at the seemingly perpetually overcast sky. She won't come. She never comes. But he waits all the same, stands at the edge of this place where the world went wrong and clings to the one fragment of hope that he has allowed to remain in his heart.

It's ridiculous really, this waiting, this stranglehold on a dream that won't die, one that never should have been given life in the first place. Others would call it a nightmare, a perversion, and he wouldn't argue, wouldn't attempt to justify or purify.

Pure things don't last anymore. Innocence gets burned away. Good intentions become corrupted, each one a new paving stone on your eventual, inevitable descent to hell. And he needs this to last, needs it to stay. So he welcomes the nightmare with open arms, embraces the perversion and holds it lovingly to his chest, just as he would hold her.

If he could. If she were here.

So instead he holds the dream and waits.

His security detail has grown weary of this habit, of making this pilgrimage every time he comes to New York. He is after all, only a scientist, a man of little media importance, unlikely to attract an assassin's bullet, or lightening bolt, depending on the assassin. Particularly now, with the notorious Hiro Nakamura under Parkman's careful, oh so tender, care. So it is no surprise his wanderings through the ruins go unnoticed, unmarked. They think him a sentimentalist, and he is in a way, coming to this place, but it's not to honor the dead.

No he waits for one he desperately prays is alive.

If he were ever to speak with Parkman, he'd find they were not that different, keeping someone's secrets in exchange for him keeping theirs. A devil's bargain with Noah Bennett and his ark of "specials," two by two they go, taking shelter from the storm.

But no one talks to Parkman, no one with secrets to keep, and he keeps far too many.

So he waits, silent, alone. Stares at the spot where they were last together and wonders why he believes it has to be here.

After all, she could find him anywhere.

If she wanted to . . .

If . . .

His fingers brush the piece of paper tucked away in his pocket, a brief letter written in a soft loopy hand, signed with a word the meaning of which she does not know. It has been his talisman, his strength, shielding him against the evils of this world, and he wonders, will it shield him from himself? When he becomes the thing that goes bump in the night, completes his reincarnation as Yamaraj, the lord of death, coming not in justice but deceit, will her words still soothe his soul?

"Hello, Dr. Suresh." The soft greeting pierces his thoughts. Her voice has changed sweet innocence soured by time, darkened by experience, but the lilt she adds to his name, the soft affection, remains, and he knows her, recognizes her the way he would a part of himself.

He doesn't turn, turning would be a dead give away, emphasis on dead. His security detail has grown lax, but not that much. Instead he continues to walk on, winding through the ruins, trusting her to follow, stopping only when he is certain the sightlines are obscured.

Even then he stands, just a few feet away, hands which desperately want to reach for her clutched to his side. He tries to absorb her presence, to take her in out of the corner of his eye. Taller than he imagined, her petite frame lengthened to the lithe, almost reed-like, body of a not quite woman. She's cut her hair, but he knew that from the last picture Bennett passed to him. What he doesn't expect is the soft, sensual mix of gardenia and sandalwood that wafts towards him as she turns. The scents of his native land, and he wonders if she knows that or if she just liked the smell.

"Dr. Suresh?" The name is tentative now. His lack of response has made her question, made her doubt.

Good. She should doubt. She should rethink, turn back. Suddenly furious with her for taking such a risk, with himself for inviting her reckless act, he hisses between clenched teeth, "You shouldn't be here."

His vehemence startles her, and she turns her head as though slapped. "But I thought-- I thought you wanted me . . . to come here."

The words, part accusation, part plea, land between them heavy and weighted with double meanings and unspoken questions. He left her, alone, unprotected, unloved, left her to fend for herself, to grow up unwatched, unnoted. Left her to follow a false dream of doing something important, something that would protect her far better than he ever could by staying. She has flourished, and he has faltered. Still, she turns to him, wishing to know the answer to questions he cannot answer. Do I meet with your approval? Are you proud? Why did you leave? Why don't you love me?

"Molly, I-" But he stops. How can he tell her he has no answers? To anything. He, who has spent his life searching for nothing but answers, has only found more questions. Can a war never officially declared ever be ended? How quickly can news of a plague spread? How does he protect her now?

Shoving her hands in coat pockets, she looks out onto the empty space, newly filled with names and stones, monuments to tragedy, a strange dichotomy of sorrow and celebration. In a few weeks he will join Sylar on the roles of mass murder and bloody death. True he will not be vilified, but somehow he doubts his victims will be memorialized either.

"You always come here. I've seen you."

The revelation shocks him into turning and before he can stop himself, he meets her eyes, eyes which have watched him, through all this time, all these years. And somehow he knows she has seen all of him, the best and the worst, and yet when she looks at him now her eyes only reflect the hero, the prince, the man of fairytale dreams.

For a few seconds she tricks him into becoming that man again. "This afternoon, the President will announce a new program, a cure, a way to reverse the genetic mutations."

"You've done it!" She takes an excited step forward, reaching out to embrace him, but he stops her, firm hands on her wrists, then moving up to cover hers, press them together in an attitude of prayer.

"No, Molly. I haven't. It doesn't . . . the cure won't work. Do you understand? Something will go wrong and by the time people figure it out, it will be too late."

Confusion flits across her face, horror following close on its heels, and she begins to struggle, trying to break free. Because it might be the last time he can ever touch her, he fights back and for all her growth, for all his age, he is still a man with muscle and weight, and she is still a slight creature of barely sixteen. He pulls her to him, clutching her to his chest, his lips grazing her ear in way that is neither loving nor sexual, only desperate, he pleads, "Don't take it. Don't let them find you. You're not sick. You're not broken. You're perfect. Do you hear me?!"

She nods against his neck, angry tears wetting his skin, and he has to step away, hold her again at arm's length as he has always done.

"Good. Go underground, so deep underground no one can find you. Not Bennett, not Parkman, not-" his breath catches and then with one final act of an ever failing will, he rips out his heart, "not me. Here . . ." He fumbles for his wallet, intent on giving her everything, bank card, train pass, house keys, anything which might give her a head start, for certainly no one would look for her in the lion's den, not for a few days.

But she steps away, shoving back his paltry offering. "No. No, I don't need it. I don't need you."

Catching her arm before she can run head first into a waiting member of his detail, he draws her back into the shadows.

"Don't be stupid. Let me help you."

She tears herself free, but doesn't leave. Instead she stands her ground, challenging him forcing him to be better. "The way you're helping them? You were supposed to _help_ them."

For a second the betrayal in her eyes is so raw, so personal, that he wonders who she would be losing.

"I can't. There is no cure. It can't be reversed."

"Then do something else."

The bitter laugh torn out of him makes her step back. "I am a scientist, a man. I'm not like you. I can't find people or read minds or stop time. And none of you can fix this, can you? Face it Molly, the world changed five years ago, nothing we have done since makes it any better."

"Then what was the point? Why did you have to leave me?"

Yet two more questions to which he has no answers. "I don't know."

He doesn't know what she sees in that moment, how she looks beyond the pathetic, weary man he has become. But then she can find anyone, even long-dead knights in tarnished white armor. Two tiny, certain steps and she is beside him, hand resting lightly at the crook of his elbow. "I do."

She doesn't elaborate, doesn't need to. The faith in her eyes is enough. Because he needs to see it, he doesn't stop himself from brushing a strand of hair away from her face, tucking it deliberately back behind her ear. She smiles, an untouched, radiant smile that he remembers from another time.

Then, standing ever so slightly on tiptoe—for although he does nothing to stop what he knows is coming, he cannot bring himself to invite it either—she kisses him, not a swift peck on the cheek as she did once, not sensual brush of lips as has only occurred in dreams. No, her lips press to the corner of his mouth, softly, deliberately, more the promise of a kiss than anything.

And yet it is everything, the purest, most beautiful moment he has been given in these past five years.

"You're my hero," she whispers softly, "Be my hero."

And then she steps away and is gone.

Later, as he holds the syringe in his hand, looks down at liquid death, he thinks of the words he spoke. _The world changed five years ago, nothing we have done since makes it any better_. Thinks of the myriad strings in Nakamura's loft, the ungainly pattern they create. The only answer can be in the past. The future has let them all down. Still he doubts, he stops. If they change the past, will he still find her? Will she still be saved? He tries to remember the pattern. Did his thread intersect with hers before or after?

He plunges the syringe into the Haitian's neck before the memory of her can talk him out of it.

After all, pure things don't last anymore.

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All feedback is appreciated.

Panache


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